


The Phone Call

by leoandsnake



Series: Jack dated Tony verse [2]
Category: 24 (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Character Study, Fingering, Hand Job, Kissing, M/M, Rough Sex, tipsy sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-03 22:29:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2890304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandsnake/pseuds/leoandsnake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fourteen months after the death of Teri Bauer, Tony Almeida is lonely and nostalgic for his brief affair with Jack. He asks him over for a drink, and the night gets away from both of them. Character study of Tony.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Phone Call

He shouldn’t call.

He calls anyway. It rings six times, or, really six and a half, because Jack picks up in the middle of the seventh ring.

As it rings, Tony drums his fingers on his countertop. It takes his fingers slightly less time to fall in succession one after the other and rise again, then pause, then fall again, than it does for a full ring to occur. He’s nervous enough to notice this.

He shouldn’t call. He’s been so good. He’s even been dating lately. For five and a half months he let the full weight of what had happened, what Nina had done, settle over him. He let himself fully feel all of the strange things you feel when you find out you’ve been dating a terrorist.

Nausea dominated him in those first few months, moreso than any actual emotion. This constant queasy feeling of disgust, like there was a brick in his chest and a swamp of acid in his stomach. He ate little and did a lot of staring; mostly at walls and the few empty spots on his desk that paperwork didn’t occupy.

There was a lot of paperwork for them after Teri Bauer’s death.

When the nausea had lessened and the brick started to crumble and dissolve, he went on dates. No one from any government agency; he knew he couldn’t handle that. But the fact itself that they were from outside his world made it downright painful to have a conversation with them. They had no idea what horror had occurred, and he couldn’t tell them. Even if he could, it would have been drawn in the abstract for them, he feared that in empathizing they would compare it in their minds to whatever petty betrayals they had in their past, and he couldn’t stand the idea of that.

This was too much for a civilian. He himself had become too much for a civilian.

He feels like it isn’t even really his story to tell, anyway. Jack is the one living a nightmare, Jack is the walking ghost. Tony is just collateral damage.

They were nice women that he went on dates with. Funny and sexy, charming and good at conversation. They liked hiking in the Valley and going to baseball games. And despite all that, he staggered through dates feeling like he wasn’t even there. From a safe distance he watched himself smile his lopsided smile and be witty and pretend like he actually wanted to have sex with them, instead of wanting to go home and press his face and body against his covers until he sank into the bed, into the floor, into the foundation and then the topsoil.

He does want to have sex. He wants to have sex with George's new hire Michelle Dessler, who is beautiful and sweet and wise beyond her years, unaffected by the grotesqueries of CTU. He thought about having sex with her two days ago as she leaned one hip against his desk, one palm down flat on it, and spoke to him at length about some work-related shit that he did not actually care about but had to pretend to care about because he has Nina’s job now. He managed to make direct eye contact with her instead of letting his gaze travel up the plane of her body that the stiff arm against the desk created and back down the other side. He wants to slide his hands into her hair and squeeze the soft fullness of her curls, then the soft fullness of her breasts. He wants to press his mouth to her neck and be alone with her in the dark and cup his hands against her hipbones as she hovers over him breathlessly. Everything about her sets him on edge, even the slope of her shoulder or the nape of her neck when she wears her hair up high.

She works at CTU. It’s a non-starter.

Against his better judgment, he still wants to have sex with Jack, too. Tony doesn’t like to actively acknowledge that. He still wants to pretend their entire affair was some fluke of his lizard brain, that Jack is so commanding and intense that he could lure Tony into sex over and over, or that he himself has some dissociative multiple personality disorder and just kept waking up on his knees with his boss’s cock in his mouth. It’s not true. He initiated sex the first time, he was the one who went too far when they were undercover and came on to Jack. He has to be totally, brutally honest with himself. He came on to Jack.

Later, Jack kissed him. Tony let Jack kiss him. Tony dragged Jack into the back of the SUV they had out for the day and tore his clothes off and let Jack’s mouth move all over his body, he grabbed Jack by the back of the head and guided him, he took Jack’s cock in his hand and masturbated him while looking directly into his eyes.

There’s nothing especially curious or experimental about Tony Almeida. And yet he’s also never been afraid to push the envelope when he decides it's necessary, to do what he's not supposed to just because he decides he should.

Which is why on one of their first few nights together, when Jack began to ever-so-gently, and almost apologetically, rub the tip of his cock against Tony’s asshole, Tony did not roll out of the bed, snarl at him, and start gathering up his clothes.

He definitely thought about it. His lip began to curl, in preparation for the snarl.

Then a visual flashed in his head, accompanied by the ghost of a sensation. Being filled by someone. More than someone; being filled by Jack. Having the lonely ache inside of him poked at and maybe soothed.

In the darkness it felt safe to wonder. He blames his first serious girlfriend who slid a finger in his ass one night while she was sucking him off, when he was too drunk to protest masculinely. What the fuck, Lisa? he would say. Should have said. (Her name was Lisa).

The words came to his lips and faded. There was something inside of him that she was stroking, a nice part that responded to her touch. It felt so good alongside the sensation of her mouth on him.

“What are you doing,” he mumbled in a flat voice after a moment had passed.

“Feels good, right?” she said. Her eyes were lit up insanely. She was on coke. It was 1990 in San Diego: everybody was on coke.

He wondered what more would be like. Wider and harder and more aggressive. He wondered what the thrust of Jack’s hips against him, into him, would be like.

Tony looked into Jack’s eyes, and rolled over for him.

He thinks about that night still. Too often, probably. They did it several times after that. He always liked the idea of it just as much, if not more than, the sensation itself. It's of course intensely arousing to have those nerves stimulated. But he also enjoyed the act from an emotional distance: that familiar sense of being outside of yourself. He watched Jack split him apart, watched Jack manhandle and sodomize him. That dark horrible thing inside of him that whispered you deserve this at every disappointment or indignity was the same one that was so pleased and sexually satisfied at the idea of Tony on all fours with his married boss fucking the shit out of him, while he was gasping, moaning, begging.

On the day he calls Jack, he spends the last hour at work in a state of agitation. He can’t get Jack out of his head. At this point, the concept of Jack is so tangled up with guilt and fear and shame, with Catholic sexual anxiety and Nina’s betrayal and his familiar sense of workplace sexual frustration (this time with Michelle) that the mere thought of him throws Tony’s gut into turmoil. He turns into a distracted idiot who slinks around the bullpen, half wanting to go into the bathroom and fuck himself on his own fingers to get some relief.

He goes home and pours himself some scotch, then a little more scotch. There’s beer in his fridge and he thinks about having one. He rubs his palms on his thighs.

He wants to be fucked. He really just wants to be fucked.

At this point, though, Tony isn’t ready to call Jack. His apartment is loud with silence, so he turns on ESPN and just sits there, processing none of what he’s watching.

He thinks about jerking off, but knows instinctively that it wouldn’t satisfy whatever he’s feeling.

He takes a long hot shower. He thinks about Michelle, about the soft swoop of her breasts disappearing into her shirt. He thinks about her surprisingly strong grip that he discovered yesterday, when she grabbed him by the bicep and apologetically wheeled him around so he didn’t go into a meeting with Division with old information.

He thinks about the time Jack grabbed both his wrists and pinned them behind his back.

Tony’s fingers drift downward and skim instinctively over his dick, but he backs off. He doesn’t want to get hard, he doesn’t want to not be able to think straight.

He should write the night off and go to bed. He brought his laptop home to do some work with, but there’s nothing that needs his immediate attention.

He should not walk out of the bathroom and head straight for the dresser. He should not start dressing in some of his most attractive work clothes, he should not put a tiny dab of Acqua di Gio in the middle of his throat. He should not run his hands through his hair. He should not brush his teeth, unless he’s going to bed, and he knows he’s not going to bed.

He should not call.

Tony does call. He calls and his heart immediately rises up in his chest like it’s furious at him. He’s negotiated hostage situations and talked down terrorists and sniped down enemy guerillas who were seconds away from sniping him. And yet, calling Jack Bauer scares the living shit out of him.

On the sixth and a half ring, he hears “Hello?”

Jack sounds confused and tired. Tony instantly regrets his decision. It’s been fourteen months since Teri died. That’s not long enough to mourn your life partner. That’s not long enough to be back to any kind of normal. Tony feels like a cheap stupid whore.

“Hey,” he says, despite all that. “It’s Almeida.”

“Yeah, I know.”

There’s a beat of about two seconds.

“What’s up?” Jack says.

“I was wondering if you wanted to have a drink,” Tony says. “Just catch up. Wanted to see how you were doing.”

Jack laughs a hollow little laugh. “You want me to come out to a bar with you?”

“I didn’t say anything about a bar.”

It’s a ballsy line. He’s all in now.

“Your apartment?” Jack’s voice is even lower than it usually is. A pound of gravel rolling around in a velvet sack.

“Yeah,” Tony says.

He’s leaning with his palm pressed against the counter so hard that his shoulder starts to ache.

There’s another pause.

“I’ll be over in about an hour,” Jack says, and hangs up without a goodbye.

It’s a long hour. When his initial “oh shit, he knows what this is” reaction wears off, he realizes Jack didn’t tell him to go to hell, which either means he’s coming here to tell him off in person for being an inconsiderate jackass or he’s coming to fuck Tony. It’s highly unlikely it’s the first one. Jack is nothing if not economical with his time.

He decides he can just blow Jack. Just drink a little more until he’s good and loaded, blow him, and he’ll leave right after. Why wouldn’t he? Everyone knows how far off the rails Jack has gone. There hasn’t been any marked improvement. He’s not on good terms with Kim, according to an agent who checked up on her.

George checks up on him every few days by way of one of their friends with the LAPD doing a quick drive by his place. Jack takes the newspaper inside every morning, and that’s it. For all they know he spends all day staring at a wall.

Tony will blow him, and he’ll leave.

But he knows he can’t deny the ache inside of him, the deep longing for the kind of intimacy that they shared every time Jack was inside of him. It was a kind of intimacy they had no right to, as two guys who just worked together and barely got along. It’s the kind of intimacy he’s only felt with women he really cared about. He knows, he knows, he knows, that it is just a confused jumble of his feelings of vulnerability and fear and their sexual chemistry.

He knows that.

Knowing changes absolutely nothing for him.

Jack is going to walk in, in fifteen minutes now, and look into his eyes and see the need in them. He’s going to take a drink and Tony has until the time he finishes it to prepare for what they’re going to do.

Tony stands up from the couch and paces around a little. At some point he had another beer and a little more scotch and he’s tipsy now. He slips on the stupid little shag rug in front of the couch and his hand comes down hard on the side of the coffee table to stop his fall. That’ll be a bruise tomorrow. The impact of him against the coffee table makes water slop up over the side of a glass and spread out in a puddle that glimmers weirdly in his drunken vision.

“You’re an idiot,” he says out loud to himself as he wipes the table down with paper towels.

As soon as he throws them in the trash there’s a knock on the door. Tony’s heart stutters again.

He answers the door.

Jack looks both like he hasn’t slept in days and like he has done nothing but sleep for days. He has the beginnings of a grief beard and the musk of depression on him, a dry smell like summer clothes being unearthed after a long winter.

“Hey,” Tony says.

Jack just nods and enters his apartment. He seems uncomfortably sober, so Tony brings him some scotch while he sits down on the couch. Jack fixes a look at the triangle of chest he’s showing from having one of his buttons undone. Instead of feeling a little thrill, Tony feels caught out as being inappropriate, like a mom pushing a stroller is watching him scratch his balls on a bench in a public park.

His already dark mood is all the more soured by that one brief moment. He’s used to Jack acting like his golden older brother, used to his own more complex moral code being an aspect of him that Jack is both disgusted by and attracted to. Despite the less than ethical decisions Jack has made, he still has the innate ability to shame anyone he wants to - to focus the fixed blue lasers of his eye contact in disapproval and make Tony flash back to his days as a misbehaved kindergartener. He had been too distracted and contradictorily too single-minded, too despairing of the concept of one person being his ultimate authority, too interested in what his classmates were up to to finish his own coloring (which he, being precocious as well as the oldest in the class, immediately identified as a pointless exercise designed to eat up time) and in the end, too passive aggressive. His parents were called a few times and his no-nonsense Sicilian mother would demand to know exactly what it was he was doing wrong. When the teacher could produce no specific offense, she would mumble angrily and then ask to be let go so she could get back to working her busy job in the bustling heart of Chicago. By first grade, he had learned how to appropriately comport himself to authority, and to fake deference, which would go on to serve him well in the Marines.

As used to this treatment from Jack as he is, though, Tony’s buried feelings of guilt are already rising to the surface like floating corpses. He doesn’t want to feel like he was alone in making this mess. Jack came, he showed up, he’s sitting on the couch drinking scotch while Tony awkwardly hovers in the kitchen, pretending to do something when he’s actually just gripping the underside of the countertop like he wants to snap a chunk of it off.

“You’re already complicit, you’ve been complicit, you did this to me,” he wants to say. He is trembling the slightest bit from the alcohol and from the adrenaline flooding his body.

Jack drinks the scotch quickly and gets up, coming over to the counter. Tony’s muscles bunch up the way they do when he’s about to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

He takes the bottle of Johnnie Walker and pours himself some more without meeting Tony’s eyes.

Tony waits, trying to breathe like a normal person. He’s grateful for the fact that despite everything, he at least looks composed.

Jack polishes off half of the glass he pours and hunkers down against the counter, leaning heavily on it with his elbows. He reaches out and takes Tony’s hand, laying it on the counter palm up and placing his own on top of it, palm down.

“Relax,” he says.

“I’m fine,” Tony replies, too quickly.

“I can feel your pulse,” Jack says. His voice is getting progressively hoarser the more uses it. He’s out of practice speaking.

Tony resists the urge to jerk his hand away and makes another attempt to breath more deeply.

“You look good,” Jack continues. He seems to be coming from far away and at a slight delay, like Tony’s trying to videoconference with him.

Tony laces his fingers in Jack’s and stares at him.

“I have, uh… I’ve thought about you a few times.”

Tony’s face comes together into a rueful smirk by habit. He tries to smooth his brow, relax his mouth.

“I’ve just been…” Jack trails off and looks into middle ground. He seems like he might be about to cry.

The counter space between them seems suddenly massive, maybe because Tony is really feeling the alcohol now and has his crotch pressed to the drawer he is leaning against.

“Yeah, no, I get it,” he says after a pause. “I, uh, I feel like a complete dickhead that I even called you. I just got kind of… I wanted...”

Him trailing off says more than any words he could think of right now would.

Jack finishes his drink. “I didn’t do a good job leaving things with you. That’s not your fault.”

He feels relief, and then his nerves spike again over how formal Jack’s tone sounds to him. His palm itches from the steady pressure of Jack’s hand.

“I’m, uh,” he says, and then stops.

Jack walks around the counter to him and turns him so his back is against it, presses their bodies together, and kisses him.

Tony doesn’t even mind the roughness of his lips or the scratch of his beard. This is the prelude to everything he’s been aching for. He needs this, just one more time, and things can go back to normal, he can move on. He can get his head straight. He can think about Michelle without his thoughts drifting to her forcing him over onto his stomach, turning into Jack and then driving into him violently.

Their bodies meld together. Jack can’t seem to press against him firmly enough, as if he can satisfy himself sexually by crushing Tony into the counter. Tony barely feels the discomfort, only registering vaguely that there is a discomfort.

As he sinks to his knees to fumble with Jack’s zipper, Jack accidentally bumps his chin with his thigh, slamming his head back against the cabinet door. Tony is delirious with the wonderful violence of it. He feels like blood is pouring out of his heart and going straight to his cock, bypassing veins and arteries and instead dumping in an orgiastic waterfall from his aorta to his genitals.

Jack doesn’t let Tony blow him. He grabs him by the elbow and drags him to his feet. Tony is struck by a kind of hysteria. He wants Jack to hit him, he wants to feel the sting of an open palm on his face. He wants to be choked, shoved, manhandled. The numbness in his gut, this massive black hole inside of him that Nina has created, is starting to ebb somewhat in the wake of such intense physicality and all Tony wants is more. He agrees with Jack. A dick in his mouth won't be enough, he needs rough hands on his body, he needs painful and urgent penetration.

“You okay?” Jack says. His hard-on is rubbing against Tony’s thigh. Tony feels what can only be described as glee. He is fucking high right now, on levels of dopamine that he had forgotten could even be reached. This bleak year caused gaps in his memory; in his understanding of pleasure.

Tony catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror on his fridge, across from them in the small kitchen. He looks how he feels. His mouth and cheeks are flushed with blood. His hair has been undone from his workday hairspray and mousse prison. His eyes are wild, squinted with lust. A muscle in his jaw is twitching.

"Yeah," he responds.

Tony takes Jack’s hands and slides them over his own hips, kisses him again while at the same time walking the two of them together over to the kitchen table where he turns and slides down across the surface, face down, presenting himself.  

There is a thrill deep in his bones. This is what he wanted, and he’s getting it.

“Tony,” Jack says, and it’s almost reprimanding, but his voice is saturated with need.

Tony has his elbows planted against the table and he slides down further so that his forearms are stretched out across it.

He reaches down with one hand and starts to undo his belt, which is a trial without being able to see it.

“Tony,” Jack sighs. He comes closer again, pressing his crotch to Tony’s ass, letting his hands slide over his hips and his waist, untucking his shirt for him.

Tony gets his belt undone and tugs it viciously from its loops, letting it clatter to the floor.

“There’s Vaseline in the bathroom,” he says.

Jack disappears from behind him and Tony watches him go down the hall, open the door to the guest bathroom, fumble loudly and distractedly in the drawers for a few seconds and then walk back out. Tony turns slightly just so he can look over his shoulder and watches Jack pick his wallet up off the coffee table and probe through it impatiently, looking for the condom he knows is somewhere in there.

“Toward the back,” Tony says, clearing his throat. His head is fuzzy. He’s not wearing underwear, and precome is dripping directly onto his thighs. He reaches down and pulls his socks off, then lets his pants fall to the ground.

“You don’t need it,” he amends. His voice grinds up against his throat uncomfortably. His body seems to know deep in its tissues that now is not the time for talking.

“Fine,” Jack says as he walks back over. He sounds impatient, like he just wants to be fucking already, even though he’s the one who seems to be stalling.

His wet fingers are in Tony before Tony even realizes Jack is behind him again. There’s a sharp jerk of surprise in Tony’s chest and then that precognitive tug of arousal in his balls, a reaction not to what’s happening but what’s about to.

Jack is careless enough as to border on violent, shoving three lubed fingers in and then yanking them out and replacing them with one, then shoving four in, with all of the gentleness he’d afford a bag of potato chips. Tony squeezes his eyes shut against the tight stretch of his own body. Jack throws him a bone by giving his prostate a few strong, sure finger strokes that push a gasp out of Tony’s lungs.

“Fuck me,” he says without meaning to, and that familiar heady sense of disassociation sweeps over him.

Jack grunts affirmatively and shoves him further forward until he’s sprawled across the table, and grabs his leg to shove his right thigh up onto the table, spreading his legs as far apart as possible. He thrusts against him idly and Tony grabs the lip of the other side of the table. He has a passing thought of being grateful this is a sturdy piece and not some IKEA bullshit.

Jack grabs his hair so hard that his head is yanked back and then he’s being slid into and fucked.

He moans, and he doesn’t mean to, but he never does. It’s a surprise every time, rising out of him, full-throated and hearty.

“Fuck,” Tony says, “fuck, fuck.” The pain of the stretch is hideous but he pushes through it. His own erection is fading in the wake of this cacophony of sensation and his hard-on is replaced with a more skin-level arousal, a tightness and a tension that covers him like a thin layer of sweat. All he wants to be is fucked and all he can do is be fucked.

He knows Jack is holding back and as soon as this thought enters his mind he says “deeper” in a throaty, agitated voice.

Jack adjusts, pulls Tony’s ass closer to his pelvis and hammers at him harder. Tony lets out a sharp cry of pain. His fingernails are digging into the wood at the edge of the table and his other arm is bent under himself. He keeps resisting the urge to bite his own hand. He doesn’t want to stop feeling this at absolute max. He wants this until he can no longer physically stand it, he wants to feel until his nerves are screaming. He wants to scream and he does, not really a scream but a hard wailing yell of “God,” and then again. He screams God’s name like a man abandoned by him.

His heart shudders in his chest from sensation. He adjusts on Jack as best he can without stopping him, and Jack gets a good three stabs at his prostate. Tony starts asking for God again. His face is burning. Tears of pain gathered in his eyes and never fell; the tip of his nose stings. He moans some more as Jack steadily thrusts into him for what feels like an endless amount of hours and in reality is more like three minutes. He arches his back a little and that pushes more noise out of his lungs.

“You’re going to make me come,” Jack says, his voice punctuated by the effort of every thrust. It’s the first thing he’s said, everything else has been breathy grunts and sighs of pleasure.

“Go ahead,” Tony says with a nasty edge in his voice. He feels possessed by Nina suddenly; it’s like Jack is fucking the last remaining shards of her out of him, and she’s not going without a fight.

He imagines that he is her, being fucked by Jack, and it’s too much for him, his forehead comes down on the table. He’s hard again. Jack lets go of his hair and starts to touch his cock. Tony knocks his hand away and Jack slides it around his hip instead so he’s holding Tony around the waist, then uses that leverage to fuck him more roughly.

Tony’s eyes haven’t been fully open since they started and finally he blinks and opens them, letting the light of the kitchen back in.

Jack comes inside of him. He feels it, deep in him, and it makes him harder and disgusts him all at once. Tony hears Jack stagger away and backward, hitting his lower back off the counter. Tony lets himself slide bonelessly off the table and he sinks to his side on the kitchen floor. It’s cold down here. Semen trickles hotly down his thigh.

“Get up,” Jack says. “Tony, please.”

Tony rolls onto his back and tries to sit up, but gravity pushes him in the chest and he lies back down.

“You’re drunk,” Jack says, like this is news.

Tony starts laughing and it must sound harsh and awful, nothing like amusement, because Jack’s brow knits together.

“Your lip is bleeding,” he says.

Tony touches his mouth and looks at his fingers.

“Yeah.”

“You hit your mouth off the table.”

He doesn’t remember that.

Choke me, he wants to demand. Fuck me again and choke me while you do it. Instead he says, “Are you heading out?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Drive?”

“Or be alone,” Jack says pointedly.

Tony’s head is foggy and full of a lot of nonsense. Fragments of sentences and random things he remembers from his day at work. He feels like he got a hard reboot.

Jack kneels in front of him and helps him to his feet.

They get upstairs and Tony isn’t really aware of how. Jack tucks him into bed, unbuttons his shirt the rest of the way, takes it off of him and hangs it up. Something about that seems insane. Our girlfriend killed your wife and you just came in my ass and tucked me into bed.

“I should shower,” he says.

“What?” Jack demands, turning around. He was taking his own shirt off and stopped halfway. In the shadows he looks like a giant clumsy bird of prey.

“I should shower.”

“What?” Jack says again.

Tony always forgets how quiet his voice is. “Shower,” he says, with a lot of emphasis on the vowel sounds necessary to communicate the word.

“Tony, just go to sleep.” Jack tosses his shirt on the floor.

He always use to shower after they did this. It gave him a certain peace of mind, helped him maintain the mental fiction that this was something that happened by accident.

“All right,” he says, finally. He doesn’t like to acquiesce like this, but he doesn’t think he can make it to the shower on his own.

Jack slides into bed next to him. Tony rolls onto his other side and Jack begins to jerk him off.

Tony buries his face in Jack’s chest. Their bodies are pleasantly warm from the animal activity of sex and from being underneath a sheet together. Tony likes the feel of Jack against him, he likes the tangy male smell of him. It brings up his fuzzy, fond memories of organized sports and basic training.

He likes the stroke of Jack’s hand, too, but that reaches him from farther away, like a veil divides him above and below the waist.

“Jack,” he murmurs.

Jack kisses him on his hairline, then sweeps his hair away from his face and kisses him more softly on the forehead.

He comes into Jack’s hand. It’s a pitiful showing and he only feels the release directly in his cock and in a mist of pleasure that descends over his brain for a few moments.

Jack is extraordinarily quick of reflexes even when drunk, and manages to get his hand fully wiped off with the tissues next to the bed and be back under the covers in a matter of seconds.

“Sorry this was fucked up,” Tony mutters. He fumbles for more words and they slip away from him. He clears his throat. “I don’t know why I called you.”

“It’s fine, Tony. I wanted to see you.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t… I don’t, uh. She was right in front of me, every day. I didn’t…”

“We don’t need to do this,” Jack says, stroking his hair.

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Yeah. Betrayal will do that to you.”

Tony is silent for a long moment. “I’m sorry.”

“You did nothing wrong,” Jack says, his voice very soft. “You were better to me than you needed to be that day. You proved to me what I suspected about you.”

“That I’m a stupid schmuck?”

“That you’re a better man than you ever give yourself credit for.”

Tony wordlessly turns and presses his naked back to Jack’s bare stomach. Jack slides one hand over his waist. They fall asleep.

 

/

 

Pale light registers behind Tony’s eyelids and rouses him from a series of convoluted, twisted dreams which he is somehow not the protagonist of. He opens his eyes.

He’s uncomfortably hovering at the edge of the bed. Jack’s hard-on is pressed against his lower back, Jack having slid up on the bed in his sleep. Tony sits up and turns to see him with his head jutted up against the headboard, his naked body starkly pale against Tony’s dark navy bedsheets. His mouth twitches in his sleep.

Tony’s head is pounding with dehydration. He can practically feel the hateful throb of his liver. It’s 5:21 AM. He’s not going to get back to sleep, he knows.

He reaches out and runs his hand over Jack’s torso. Jack mumbles in his sleep. His muscular body arches into Tony’s touch.

“Jack,” Tony says, and then again a little louder. His eyes light on the Vaseline, which Jack had apparently brought upstairs with them and set on his bedside table. Smart guy.

Jack is stirring.

Tony slides down between his legs and starts to stroke the hardness between his legs.

Jack rolls over, tangled in sheets, and is suddenly awake.

Tony stills, waiting.

“What are you doing?” he says, in a thick, confused voice.

He still doesn’t know how to ask for what he wants until after it’s already happening. He lets his silence speak for him.

With a tender kind of force, Jack drags him down and shoves him onto his back against the bed.

“Yeah?” Jack says.

“Yeah,” Tony replies. It comes out as a ragged exhale.  

Jack retrieves the Vaseline and starts mechanically applying it. Halfway through this process he lets out a sigh and stops, hands resting on the bed on either side of Tony, looking into middle space at nothing.

Tony pulls him close and kisses him, because he feels like a jackass just lying there. Jack warms under his touch like butter. Tony deepens the kiss, slides his hand around the nape of Jack’s neck and Jack thrusts against him. He takes Jack’s cock in his other hand and maneuvers it into himself. He relishes in the slight discomfort, the twinge of pain. He knows at some point during the first few hours of his workday a burning ache is going to develop inside of him, and he looks forward to it perversely. He is deeply gratified by private martyring, by suffering in silence.

Jack starts to rock back and forth into him. A small gasp escapes his mouth. He’s raw and overstimulated enough that it doesn’t really feel great physically, but the previous night cracked his chest open and soothed the neglected needy thing in the center of him, his burning need for intimacy that rises up stronger the harder he smashes it down. His large, bleeding heart, the thing in him that cries out to be able to love people and to protect them, to take care of and be cared for, the thing that makes his life so hard sometimes. Sex is the only way he feels can staunch that bleeding, the only thing he can do to heal the needy part of him. Jack is far away. This is the only way Tony can call him back.

They look into each other’s eyes and kiss some more. Jack is barely fucking him at this point. His thrusting is forgetful and erratic, and when he goes soft inside of Tony, neither of them are surprised. Jack stays in him for a moment, and Tony strokes his rough, bearded cheek with his thumb. He kisses his forehead.

Finally Jack falls to his side on the other side of the bed, seeming exhausted. He pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs his eyes. Tony sits up and looks at him.

“You should get ready for work,” Jack mutters.

Tony feels nauseated by the mere mention of it. “Yeah,” he agrees. He gets up. It’s only been ten minutes. He feels a roll of shock at that.

Tears are running down Jack’s face.

Tony sits back down on the edge of the bed. He touches the lump of Jack’s feet under the covers.

“Go take your shower,” Jack says. His voice is so throaty and broken up that Tony can barely hear him.

The shower feels like it’s twenty miles away. It might as well be the destination of his morning commute.

He finally does make it into the bathroom and starts mechanically going about his routine. While he soaps himself, he gingerly touches where Jack fucked him. It’s not as painful as he expected. The real ache is in the muscles deep in his thighs from spreading them so wide, and there’s a small tender knot on the back of his head from the impact of the kitchen counter.

The water coursing over him brings him slowly back from outer space. He grounds himself in reality. He thinks about Michelle, and his heart jumps. He wonders if she ever thinks about him like this. If she stands in the shower in the morning and rubs shampoo into her curly hair and thinks about him, if she smiles like he's doing right now.

He remembers Jack crying in his bed, and that slices through his new, more cheerful thoughts. They fall apart like ribbon. Tony steps out and wraps a towel around his waist.

As if he’s been summoned, Jack walks in fully dressed in last night’s clothes and leans against the doorway. He silently watches Tony brush his teeth.

When he finishes, Tony rests his palms on either side of the sink. He doesn’t know what to do or say. He feels as if he was hanging onto the edge of a cliff for a torturously long time, until the muscles in his arms tore and he was blinded by the pain, and he finally let go and fell into the deep lush gorge of the ravine below. Now he’s landed and he’s lying there dazed. Wondering if he broke his back, wondering if he’ll be able to get up and walk away or if he’ll die right here, staring up at the sky.

“I’m going to head out,” Jack says. He seems more sure of his voice than he did last night.

Tony straightens up and looks at him, self-conscious of the fact that he’s only wearing a towel.

“All right,” he says, and clears his throat.

Jack steps closer and leans into him. They kiss each other gently. Jack stops and presses his forehead against Tony’s.

“You gonna be all right?” Tony asks.

“I don’t know,” Jack says honestly.

“Are you gonna stay in touch?”

“Tony…”

Jack pulls away from him and rests his hands on the edge of the sink, on either side of Tony’s hips.

“You should try to let go of all this,” he says. “Everything that happened. Including me.”

“It’s not just me, Jack,” Tony says, sounding more offended than he is. “Everyone’s concerned about you.”

Jack gives him a tired, lopsided smile. “George is concerned about me?”

“Yeah,” says Tony, louder than he intended to. “Yeah, he is.”

“I’ll try to give him a call,” Jack says, straightening up.

“How’s Kim?”

Jack shakes his head. “From what I know, she’s okay. Don’t feel obligated to this, okay?”

“Obligated to what? To be a human being? Jack, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve matured a little from resenting you for petty shit like hiring and firing decisions.”

“I’m sure it helps you can resent George now instead,” Jack says lightly. “I’ll give him a call.”

“All right,” Tony says. “Okay. Fine.”

Jack reaches out and puts his hand on Tony’s waist, sighing softly. Tony covers his hand with his own and squeezes it.

“I’m here,” Tony says. “I can’t guarantee much else, but I’m here.”

“I know,” Jack says. “Thanks, Tony.”

He dresses quickly, combs his hair and walks Jack to the front door, watching from the doorway as Jack gets into his car and pulls out of the driveway.

It’s an odd sight but luckily, his neighbors pay zero attention to him. This neighborhood is popular with CTU agents and FBI Los Angeles for that reason exactly.

Tony puts some coffee on and stands in his empty kitchen, ignoring his aches and pains. It’s a little while before he has to leave for work.

He leans back against the counter and soaks in the silence.

  
  



End file.
